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I ’d started moving the day after Serena left, but I’d stuck around in Rocky Start for another couple of days to make sure everybody was settled: Bea was safe in rehab, Dottie and Lionel were back in control of their Eye in the Sky and not feeding info to anybody but each other and Max if needed, Coral and Pike were permanently settled in over Ecstasy, Jackie was getting ready to move into Nice Funerals as soon as Reggie finished her new clinic sign (Nice Funerals, Jackie said, was not a good sign for a clinic), and Luke was making real progress on the building there and on Jackie. And it turned out that Poppy and Marley were ridiculously well-matched. I worried about them being so young, but then young in Rocky Start was not like young anyplace else. They knew what they were doing, so I stopped worrying. Mostly.

And then there was Max and me and Maggs. She’d come with me today as I moved the last of my boxes out of Oddities and into the half-finished but still livable cottage. I mean, drywall would be nice, but it was quiet in the forest except for when Fernanda and Dolly came by to crop whatever grass was left naked by melting snow.

It was late afternoon by the time I’d moved the last box in, and as I turned on lights and looked around, I could see that people had been in. The plumber had been there to put in my kitchen sink, which made me ridiculously happy. There was now running water both in the kitchen and upstairs in the bathroom, real progress. The new stove hadn’t arrived yet, which bothered me not at all. I’d had enough cooking for a while, and when I checked the undercounter fridge that was doing stand-in duty until the big one came, Poppy had filled it with food including a pan of lasagna, so that would make Max happy.

So I started to unload the boxes. There were a lot of them because Poppy and Marley had been bringing them over all week. I unpacked the ones I’d packed—at least I knew what was in those—and started setting up house, which made me feel more and more like I was finally home, more than I’d ever felt at Oddities, to my surprise. That had been Ozzie’s house.

This was mine.

And there was fun stuff to discover, besides the lasagna. Poppy had put iPods in every room—we had a lot of those thanks to Ozzie’s tendency to buy them for every holiday—and she’d loaded all four with playlists of my favorite music and all new stuff, too. Now I could have any music I wanted at my fingertips in any of the four rooms. She’d put “Fairytales of New York” on there, which was always going to make me laugh because Hermione had piped that out to all of Rocky Start without listening to it first, and then come into the store steaming about my choice of Christmas music. “You don’t want my favorite, don’t ask,” I told her, and she stomped back to Oxley, who was doomed to have a lot of sex and a bookstore that would shortly belong to his future wife, along with anything else he owned, because he could not say no to her.

Not my problem.

When I was down to the boxes Poppy had brought in, I opened the first one and found the rest of the masks Ozzie had left me and all my glue and knives and collage stuff. A second box held all of the miscellaneous stuff I’d collected for collage over the years, hundreds of tiny metal pieces, lace and ribbon, stickers, old pieces of toys of Poppy’s, just a huge box of junk for me to sort through. It made me want to make plans for more collage, which is pretty much what I thought Poppy wanted.

But the next box was a revelation. All new acrylic paints and all my painting equipment that I hadn’t used in years. Good black pens and water colors and sketchbooks and even a watercolor block. The thing about painting is, you need time to yourself to do it right, lots of time, and I had given that up when I’d had to raise Poppy and take care of Ozzie. Poppy was pretty much grown up, so that part of my plan was finished. Except you’re never finished raising a kid. But now I had time to paint, lots of time, all for me.

The last box had a three-foot Christmas tree decorated with things from the shop, including one of Ozzie’s Santa skulls, and at the top she’d tied my bottle self-portrait as an angel, too big for the tree but still great. I set it up in the window at the top of the stairs and plugged it in, and all the little white lights came on in the dim light from the window, and even though it was brand new, it felt like home.

Well, Santa skulls can do that for you.

So I sat there on the window seat at the top of the stairs that looked out over the Little Melvin to Rocky Start and felt peaceful and happy and loved. I was on the right side of the river, my kid had sent me a Christmas tree, I wasn’t making lasagna, and my lover was probably coming home to me shortly unless he’d decided to head back to the Appalachian Trail?—

The door banged downstairs and Maggs went down the stone steps as a one-dog welcoming committee and then came right back up, Max’s steady tread right behind her. When he reached the top of the stairs, he had another box in his hands, but he stopped when he saw me.

“What’s up?” he said, and I would have gone with the Cheery Boost and an equally cheery “Nothing!” but I wasn’t doing that anymore because this was my Act Four. Things were going to be different now.

“When are you going back on the Trail?” I asked and he put the box down and sat beside me, crowding me a little with warmth and his smile.

“Why the hell,” he asked, “would I go back to the Trail?”

“You didn’t finish it,” I told him. “And you always finish your mission.”

“That wasn’t my mission, that was Herc’s mission. My mission was getting to Rocky Start and you. I’m here. With you. Are you mad at me?”

“No,” I said, absolutely truthful. “But I don’t ever want to have someone controlling me.”

“That makes two of us,” Max said. “Could you explain to me what we’re talking about? I get the feeling this is a big moment and I’m missing it.”

I thought about it. “Coming out here feels like the first time in my entire life that I’m living for me and not for somebody else.”

Max nodded. “Do you want me to live back in Rocky Start so you can be alone?”

I straightened up. “ Hell , no, don’t even think about it.”

He shrugged. “Then I’m good. The last thing I want is to control you. I have a hard enough time controlling me.” He put his arm around me and leaned back against the window and took me with him, so I put my head on his shoulder and just relaxed into him. He stroked my cheek with his thumb, his hand warm against my face. “Change anything you want, Rose, just don’t change us.”

He sounded very sure, so I put my arms around him. “We’re going to have to figure this all out, you know. We’ve never had a normal life together.”

“We survived the abnormal life,” he said. “The normal life should be a piece of cake, but I know it won’t be since life can get in the way. But I do promise to give it everything I have to make it good.” He looked down at me. “You really thought I’d go back on the Trail after all of this?”

“I didn’t know,” I said, and he bent and kissed me and took my breath away, the way he always did, and then he said against my mouth, “Now and forever, Rosalie Malone, you and me,” and I held onto him because I did believe it. Not the piece of cake part, but I believed in us.

“I don’t mind making cake,” I told him. “We can still have that.”

“Forget the food, there’s a box to unpack, and I think it’s that performance shag rug.” He nudged the box at his foot. “It was delivered to Betty’s, and Dmitri flagged me down to pass it over. And to tell me they’re getting another rescue llama. He seemed really happy. And we’re living next to a llama rescue now.”

“I think that’s sweet,” I said.

“Tell me that when you have a herd of llamas by your front door. Give me the knife from your apron and I’ll open the shag.”

I straightened and then realized I had no pockets.

Because I wasn’t wearing my apron.

Because I’d evidently left it back at Oddities. No, at Odd Poppies.

I’d been forgetting it a lot all week, and now I realized I didn’t want it back.

Max must have noticed it at the same time because he said, “Good,” and ripped the tape off the box with his bare hands, all man, to expose a lot of fluffy fake fur.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Your choice,” he said. “You want to talk about cake or go into the bedroom and lay the new rug? So to speak.”

He grinned at me then, invitation and promise and heat and strength, everything I’d ever wanted in the shape of a middle-aged, dark-haired, weather-beaten man with a five o’clock shadow in an ancient black t-shirt, who’d come into town with a big black wolf and into my life with violence and passion and so much love that he took my breath away.

“Let’s go lay that rug,” I said.

And we did.

THE END

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